Rawls's A Theory of Justice and the Original Position

John Rawls, a Harvard philosopher, published A Theory of Justice in 1971 (Harvard University Press), a book widely credited with reviving normative political philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition after decades in which utilitarianism, associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, had gone largely unchallenged as the dominant framework for thinking about social institutions. Rawls set out to construct an alternative to utilitarianism by reviving and generalizing the social contract tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, proposing a theory he called "justice as fairness." His central claim was that principles of justice for the basic structure of society — the constitution, the economic system, the family — should be those that free and rational persons would agree to in a fair initial situation, rather than those that maximize aggregate utility across a population.